The Fijian Elections Office says it is awaiting the findings of the final report of the external audit that commenced following the ‘glitch’ at the 2022 General Election.
This has been highlighted in the Joint Report of the Electoral Commission and the Supervisor of Elections for the 2022 general elections.
The report said the FEO encountered an anomaly with the FEO Results App during the release of the results, where the App ceased functioning and, when it returned after several hours, there appeared to be inconsistent results.
The commission was briefed regarding the anomaly by the former Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem.
Following this anomaly with the FEO Result App, the commission received complaints from a number of individuals via the Electoral Commission complaints portal.
The complainants sought manual counting of the votes for the 2022 general election.
The report said that as a result, the commission did a media release on 16th December 2022 to clarify that the FEO Results App is not used to count votes but is used to upload the data after the votes have been manually counted and the Protocol of Results is entered in the Result Management Information System.
Speaking to the media, the Acting Supervisor of Elections, Ana Mataiciwa said just like the public, the Fijian Elections Office is awaiting the external audit report on the ‘glitch’.
Their internal audit says the ‘glitch’ was a human error.
“We have the Results Management System which is an offline network, and then you have the 2022 Elections Results App, online network… The FEO staff that moved the data from the offline system to the online moved the wrong data.”
“That was what was seen in the preliminary investigation,” Mataiciwa added.
